schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

The goal of Enterprise Agility is to have a nimble, flexible organization. To reach this end we need to have a clear decision-making process that supports autonomy and learning while achieving effective outcomes.

The Advice Process is easy to understand. Anyone in the organization can make a decision provided they get advice from everyone who will be meaningfully affected and people with expertise in the matter. The Advice Process helps organizations develop trust, ownership and learning to create a nimble organization. The Advice Process originates from corporate innovation as documented in “Joy at Work” and “Reinventing Organizations”

In this hands-on session you will learn how to use “Advice Poker” cards as a sense-making and education tool to explore how decisions are made and can be made. The Advice Process will be contrasted with other approaches such as consensus and traditional hierarchical decision-making. You will walk away with a powerful tool to invite greater levels of trust and ownership to allow Agile to scale.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Why do so many organizations struggle to put in place mature Agile teams that can apply proper Agile principles and deliver awesome products? Some people will say, “Agile is hard” as an excuse to not do Agile or to become frAgile. Well we think we have developed the “Secret Sauce” to rebooting any Agile team that just doesn’t seem to be maturing and we want to share it with you!

If you are thinking of scaling Agile across a large organization, then this talk is a must to attend to help ensure your teams have the right foundation. Organizations wanting to scale Agile must have a solid foundation of mature Agile teams who embrace the Agile values and have the right Agile mindset.

Over the years, as we have done Agile transformations in different organizations, we have seen common patterns that keep repeating. The most common pattern we found in our experience is that teams are frAgile. Too many either pretend to be Agile or don’t even know Agile is not a methodology, so organizations question the value of using Agile. Very often the confusion and frustration that comes with thinking that a team is Agile when they are not Agile, brings people right back to their old habits of command and control. Creating successful mature Agile teams is not sorcery, you need to discover the secret sauce!

In this talk, we will reveal our secrets on how to create a successful Agile-Scrum team in 5 sprints. Attendees will learn how we applied our secret sauce as we experimented with more than 30 teams and we refined the know-how. This recipe has proven to be successful in different organizations and teams delivering different types of products. Our Creative-Destruction approach goes through a human change process we labeled The Intervention Plan. The 5 steps are:

Step 1: Run in the rain

Step 2: Thunderstruck

Step 3: Cry over the M&M’s machine

Step 4: Open-up and look at the sun

Step 5: Removing the training wheels

And by using these 5 steps, attendees will discover the 5th Agile value!

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

The stereotype of technical professionals as inarticulate, socially inept geniuses inventing problems to solve is unkind and inaccurate. Yet the Dilbert image persists. So do jokes like the one about the engineer sentenced to death on the guillotine, who watches the instrument of death malfunction, then tells the operators how to fix it.

Why do people make fun of engineers? Do people wired and trained to analyze and solve problems and focus on the mechanics of a situation frustrate those whose brains are wired differently? And how does the engineer’s way of dealing with individuals and interactions - that first value of the Agile Manifesto - sometimes get in the way of team collaboration and productivity?

In this interactive session, we'll show a little empathy for engineers and other analytical folk whose neurological wiring makes them seem different from the rest of humanity. We'll also explore how those with the engineering mindset can develop their own empathy and consciously adopt behaviours that amplify their value to their teams and organizations, make them more effective leaders - and make their own lives easier by positioning themselves for understanding. Join Sue in a lively exploration of what can happen when engineers and technical professionals shift their mindset from solving problems to creating impact.

You will leave this session with an appreciation of

How to make your ideas meaningful to others by taking their perspective

How shifting your language from "What?" to "So What?" helps people connect the dots

Why giving up the need to be smart may be the smartest thing you ever do

Gil Broza - How to Get Your Whole Team Talking

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

"Agile has too many meetings." "Our meetings are a waste of time." "It's always the same two people talking while everyone else is on their phones or laptops." Indeed, meetings are often pretty bad… but they are also necessary. Agile teams can't fully implement the 3 C’s (communication, collaboration, and consensus) only by inhabiting an open space or using a messaging tool. However, it doesn't take much to make a meeting effective, collaborative, and a welcome experience for its participants. Come to this experiential session to learn 10 simple changes you can make -- without having to become a professional facilitator -- to make your meetings matter.

Mishkin Berteig - Launching an Agile Team with the Skills Matrix

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Participants learn the “Skills Matrix” technique for getting a new Agile team started and for getting established teams to leap to the next level of capability. This technique has been used for decades at Toyota to create a team development plan in a collaborative, visual way.

Scott Ambler - Beyond “Easy Agile”: How to Overcome the Challenges of Adopting Agile in Established Enterprises

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most organizations that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.

In this presentation Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments

Declan Whelan - Moving from Technical Debt to Technical Health

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?

In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.

Selena Delesie - How Managers Nurture Teams to Thrive

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager at any level fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What do managers do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there a place for managers in an Agile organization?

YES! There is a lot for managers to do, though they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication.

In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an agile manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization .

Utpal Chakraborty - Agile & Lean Movie Making

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Movie making is a costly affair involves risks and uncertainties. An Agile approach of incremental moviemaking makes it more predictable and risk resilience.Up to 20% of the overall Budget of the movie can be saved by effective use of Agile & Lean techniques.Using Agile Practices in Movie making can take you to your destination in a systematic way.Experimenting, Prototyping, Shared Learning & Using Effective Tools makes Movie making process fast, more predictable and cost effective. Prioritize scenes using “MoSCoW” technique to arrive at “Which scene to shoot Where & When”.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

As a business leader you may be the missing ingredient to an organization effectively transitioning to Agile. Agile requires a culture shift in governance from a chess master (command and control) to a gardener (cultivates the organizations).

“With the right Agile Top-Down approach, the ride to success is always better!”

As PwC’s national agile leaders, we have extensive first-hand experience providing assurance to Canadian Financial Institutions, Media Organizations, and Insurance Companies on the maturity and health of their agile teams, projects and culture. The number one reason we see Agile projects fail in the Canadian market is due to Agile being looked at like an IT technical change as opposed to an organizational change – and business leaders are often not leading that change.

We have identified 5 areas in transitioning to Agile that play a significant role in effectively meeting customer demands and business needs. We will discuss each of these areas and provide pragmatic approaches that we have advised and seen businesses implement successfully.

Vision

Culture

Changing Roles

Flexibility

Continuous Improvement

Who should attend:

As a manager or executive, if you have experienced pain points in transitioning to agile or are not seeing the benefits expected, then this interactive discussion will provide value. It is designed for business leaders to be enablers of agile while also providing assurance. If you answer yes to any of the following questions, you will likely enjoy this session!

Do you have a software team following Agile but nothing has changed in the business (governance, compliance, controls)?

Is your organization transitioning from Traditional to Agile roles and you are afraid that your position will no longer be relevant?

As an Executive, Manager, or a member of the 2nd and 3rd lines of defense, how can you become a better enabler of Agile to help achieve business objectives while providing effective assurance?

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Intermediate

“Move fast and break things.” — Mark Zuckerberg

Mobile is no longer a hobby for companies. In that world, speed is the key. My company embraced the principle of “welcoming changing requirements, even late in development.” It’s allowed us to grow, and we have accomplished some amazing things.

It’s also caused some challenges for teams. They felt the pain of this pace, and our clients were frustrated by delayed releases.

This presentation describes a 3-month case study I ran to measure things like team communication, productivity, and quality while implementing Scrum for the first time. The results were convincing, and allowed us to learn what happens when you value speed more than anything else.

I hope you’ll join me in seeing how we learned to work smarter instead of harder.

Dan Neumann - Improve Your Team: Explore Cognitive Bias

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Many team challenges can be tracked back to cognitive biases: our judgement gets anchored, we think we're better than we are, and we are our own favorite reference point. And even though we're encouraged to "think outside the box," there are conditions where we have a bias against creativity. If that's not a recipe for a tough team environment, I don't know what is.

Improve your game by learning about bias! You'll leave this session with strategies for identifying and mitigating bias on your team.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Advanced

The talk covers three start up players who scaled quickly within the Indian food tech industry in the year 2015. It draws out a common factor between the marketing strategies of the three enterprises. This common factor is then fine tuned into a KPI as it is used to analyze and measure the strategies based on data. The entire process draws it’s inspiration from Agile methodologies and the respective ceremonies held as part of Agile. These include ceremonies like retrospects and just in time reviews. The talk focuses on how a product owner/manager can contribute to the marketing/sales department of a huge enterprise/product.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

When it comes to scaling Agile, there is no one size fits all solution. Frameworks like Scrum and XP prescribe roles, events, artifacts, and rules that make it very clear how interaction should take place within a team. When we begin to add more teams to the mix, communication between teams becomes more complex. This complexity threatens to reduce our transparency and damage our culture. How can we share information, build our culture and work together, all while keeping with Agile values?

During this session Sam Lightowler and Jade Stephen will take an in depth look at the successes and failures of CBC Digital Operations when it comes to cross-team collaboration and information sharing. We will discuss what meetings and techniques have helped us build a one-team-one-product mindset, a sense of community, and a culture of Collaboration, Learning and Improvement. We will also discuss what we have tried in the past and how learning from those experiments helped us evolve into the agile-friendly and unified team that we are today.

Mishkin Berteig / David Sabine - JIRA is the Worst Possible Choice

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

thomasjeffrey - The Agile Ecosystem - Changing the way we think about Organizing to Deliver Value

schedule 2 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

A key leadership responsibility in today’s enterprises is understanding how to create organizational structure that promotes agility. Most organizations think about their organizations as a hierarchy, with departments dedicated to specialist functions like marketing, finance, or IT. This hierarchy based model can make it very challenging for knowledge workers to collaborate with each other to the extent necessary to deliver value. Especially when you consider today’s environment of constant change

With agile becoming increasingly popular, the concept of creating structure based on cross functional self organizing teams is becoming increasingly popular. There are obvious advantages to this approach such as breaking down functional silos, moving employees closer to the customer, and motivating a diverse collection of specialist towards a common goal. Organizations often face challenges when moving from a hierarchical model to one based on agile teams, and they have encountered a number of very serious challenges.

Organizational designers often struggle with creating a model that is economically feasible,. The model does not always seem to lend itself to managing scarce expertise. A different type of siloing can occur, where discrete business functions or customer experience teams have very little integration with each other, this can cause crosscutting concerns to the organization to become forgotten, and create an overall loss of organizational cohesion. Team coordination and communication becomes a concern as agile deployment scales to larger and larger efforts.

Over the last several years I have paid attention to how others are deploying agile at scale, as well as catalog my own experiences in helping customers with changing their team structure to improve agility. The results are a set of patterns that describe different ways teams can be designed to provide effective services their customers, and collaborate with each other.

During this session I want to provide participants with a chance to use a set of defined team service and team linking patterns to design an agile ecosystem; a system of self-organizing, interdependent teams, a system that constantly evolve to organize around value. This session promises to be a hands on, in depth session where attendees will be able to develop a real world example of team organizational structure designed to improve agility in their context. I'll walk attendees through the steps necessary for designers to identify the teams and interactions required to deliver value as well as the the support structures required to enable those teams.

Participants will build a real agile team ecosystem that covers the following steps:

describing the services, clients, and capabilities of your teams, and organize them into higher order missions

Applying one or more team delivery patterns

Applying one or more team linking patterns

During this session I will facilitate ecosystem design through the use of an agile ecosystem design toolkit. I will use the toolkit to describe the details of each pattern, including when to use them and some of the benefits and trade-offs required.

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Executive

Most adults have achieved a level of personal development that allows them to function effectively in their families, society and their jobs. Leaders need to handle more complexity and need to advance to a higher level of personal development to become effective in advancing an Agile transformation. "Reactive" adults are functional, but unable to manage the complexity of an Agile transformation. "Creative" (and higher levels of development are needed. This presentation examines a model of understanding leaders called the "Leadership Circle" and correlates key capabilities in the model to effectiveness in leading an Agile transformation.